At least in Germany (though articile is in England) this is not surprising. These people are and were against measles vaccines, Walddorf ideology is close to Antisemitism. I bet Jane is very likely against GMOs. And most arguments against GMOs leads to conspiracy theories very soon.

Walddorf is though very German.

"Waldorf" btw, like the hotels (and the salad).

The most common argument against GMOs I’ve seen is that glyphosate causes cancer and fucks up the environment. Given that selling glyphosate seems to be the most common reason for supporting GMOs, I’m curious to hear what conspiracy’s theories you think exist around it!

TL;DR some people have beliefs that widely differ from the median opinion of The Guardian editors. This is fascism.

100% no.

The article, if you care to read it, documents how disinformation works. You start with a little, inconsequential lie, get your suckers in a row who yearn to be part of something, then escalate.

The clear path from anti vax to killing people you don't like is well underway. If it wasn't so horrifying, speed running nazi germany would be fascinating.

I read the article it comes off exactly has the op said.

The narcissist and xenophobic desire to label everything exotic or foreign points of view as evil "nazis".

You are feeding the radicalism while thinking you are stopping it

So often hacker news users just use downvotes to silence inconvenient arguments against behaviours on the left.

I think there may be a disconnect in this conversation around a couple of points: 1) different views around misinformation about things like natural food are not a big deal, and 2) political misinformation has become a big deal

You rightfully defended #1. The parent you replied to is rightfully concerned about #2. The article said that sometimes #1 ends up leading to #2.

Nobody seems to be saying that #1 is equivalent to #2.

It’s insane how blatant it is in this article. Fascism is literally used here to mean “something I don’t like”.

I don’t agree with anti-vaxxers who fought lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates. But these people are quite literally fighting for less government control. How can that be construed as fascist?

> is a practitioner of “shamanic arts” who eats natural and organic food, and has more than once been described as an “ecofascist”.

People who eat “natural and organic food” secretly want the state to control their lives? Give me a fucking break!

The word fascism may not be as precisely or universally defined as you seem to think. In the UK over the last several decades its chief association has been with German Nazis and British Nationalists, movements characterised by antisemitism and xenophobia. Examples of those do appear in the text.

However that the word fascism is used sparingly probably indicates the authors' own doubt that it is the appropriate term.

> these people are quite literally fighting for less government control. How can that be construed as fascist?

At risk of derailing this thread... It's entirely possible for someone to fight against government control in specific areas of policy. If that person feels threatened they might become more strident in their views, and become more supportive of new policies that implemented their preferences 'firmly'.

I've rarely seen anyone support 'less government' in 100% of situations. When anyone's societal values are threatened (real or imagined) there will be demand for the government to do something about it. When people feel increasingly threatened, they support increasingly 'robust' politicians.

Having said all that, I agree that the word 'fascist' is unhelpful here.

After watching the PewDiePipeline [1] video, and now learning about the Yogapipeline ... I'm starting to wonder if this is a consequence of "flooding" or accumulation of disinformation due to an always-on firehose of falsehood [2].

[1] https://youtu.be/pnmRYRRDbuw

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

How are people supposed to tell falsehoods from truth? If such a thing exists - many things aren't b/w, but shades of grey, undetermined, or "it depends".

For every scientific study that shows X, there will be other studies showing !X. People aren't scientists peer-reviewing or questioning paper author's (potential) conflict of interest.

So they seek trusted 'authorities' to tell them what's what. Like friends, co-workers, news anchors, talk show hosts, sometimes government institutions. Or these days... cough. influencers.. cough.

In many wellness situations, there's at least some kind of trust relation between practicioners & clients. So having them serve as source-of-truth is not that strange, really.

> For every scientific study that shows X, there will be other studies showing !X

No need for even that, most misinformation cites studies that don't even say what the misinformation is citing them for. Even more common is YouTube videos titled "[something] actually happening!" and in the video a dude will ramble about nothing for an hour and nothing actually happened as far as evidence presented in the video goes.

But passing the YouTube video around with a title like that seems to be equivalent to evidence for the modern internet scroller it seems.

Ah, yes, NonCompete. When's PewDiePie going to the gulag--err, "reform centers"[0]?

[0] https://youtu.be/Hmy1jjRnl8I?t=609

inb4 a wave of downvotes crashing on you for questioning the left in any way.

I'll have to watch that video after work; but from watching about ~30 seconds it seems like he may be equating capitalism to a malady of some sort (something that needs treatment); it's an interesting theory that reminds me of a group of people that quarantined individuals that were angry so that they didn't end up "infecting" others (which I can't find at the moment, but will look up later).

It's disconcerting that those "combatting disinformation" often neglect the vital practice of earnestly challenging their own beliefs.

It seems they're fighting for a change in figures of authority not rationalism.

Anti-vax and like positions have been cause-celebre positions for other political leanings, previously and now. I guess the guardian doesn't want to look though it's archives and remember it's part in the affair.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/society/200...

Course the original article, "New health fears over big surge in autism" is now inaccessible via the guardian.* How positively "fascist", eh guardian?

*Their are dozens of other "supporting" opinion and 'concerned' articles they haven't removed. Just look before 2012 and MMR.

Funny how you're being downvoted for stating a fact.

Can the title please be changed to "’Everything you’ve been told is a lie!’ Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline"?

For a very long time there’s been sort of a hippie overlap between organic/natural foods, alternative medicine, skepticism towards Big Pharma, and antivax. Prior to 2020, if you wanted to assign a political leaning to this scene, “fascist” is probably the last one you would pick. Likewise, it’s relatively new that antipathy to the World Economic Forum or Bill Gates is considered right-wing. And if you told anyone ten years ago that a prominent anti-government protestor would be a self-described “shaman”, you would have never guessed which side he would be on.

There’s a far more interesting story that isn’t being told here. How on earth did the right become a more welcoming environment for hippies than the left? When it comes to vaccines in particular, that’s easy: the mainstream center-left was all in on COVID vaccine mandates, and were willing to alienate alt-medicine hippies to impose those policies. Anti-vaxers were always a weird, unpopular fringe group, and it was rhetorically convenient to try and dismiss all lockdown-mandate skeptics as “antivaxers”. But it’s all part of the same broader political realignment we’ve been going through over the past decade or so.

The core cultural question is whether individuals should be instruments of governments and corporations or allowed to take their own risks for their own ridiculous reasons.

In 2019, governments, corporations, and media in the West used almost every bludgeon in their power to try to persuade the public that the former was preferable to the latter in regards to almost every predicate of a successful civil society. In effect, it was an attempted corporatising of the West.

The gist implicitly being that the world is too complex for the proles to understand and therefore Good Citizens must defer to professional experts and their bureaucracies in regards to domestic policy (or you're a fascist), foreign policy (or you're a Russian plant), healthcare (or you're an antivaxxer), governance (or you're a conspiracy theorist), economics (there will be no inflation; it will only be transient), and so on and so on. "You Must Not ‘Do Your Own Research’ When It Comes To Science" is the exemplar of this viewpoint. The Stakes Are Too High. There was a coordinated attempt to make of society a national workplace piloted by SMEs and PMPs, with obvious results.

So it shouldn't be surprising that skeptics defined by their questioning of authority started questioning new emerging authorities, especially those they viewed as illegitimate and presumptuous to begin with.

If you live, or perceive yourself to live, in the Neoliberal equivalent of the 80's Soviet Union, of course you're going to doubt Pravda, the Party, and its increasingly outlandish claims as everything becomes undeniably misaligned with the reality around you.

And like the Soviet Union, deprived of real channels of information that aren't propaganda or adversarial (e.g. Pravda or Radio Free Europe), you're left to your own devices and samizdat, which naturally results in "conspiracy theories" and accusations by the State of "bourgeois nationalism" comprised of "fascist reactionaries" and "socially dangerous elements" regardless of what merits, if any, dissent entails.

The professional managerial classes of the West decided that citizens should not be allowed to meet on the level of rational argument and began by denouncing all argument; they forbade their followers to listen to rational argument, because it was deceptive, and taught them to answer arguments by the use of force. And an open society that goes down that road reaps the whirlwind.